Search Headlines & Links: Nov. 27, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today and since last Wednesday to the Search
Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we’ve spotted but not blogged
separately. Note that the recap of our stories and headlines around the web are
longer than normal due to us being largely off over the Thanksgiving holiday.
There was a lot of catch-up to do!

From The SEW Blog…

Q&A On
Google’s Belgium News Agreements
This week, news emerged about an agreement between Google and two Belgian
author groups that were suing it over copyright issues. Below, a short Q&A on
what this means for Google. Highlights: The case goes on with three other
groups taking part, but large damages seem unlikely. The new deal gives
especially seems to give Google photo rights. Google says it is not doing an
about-face on opt-out in Denmark. More about these an other issues covered
below, based on a talk with Google spokesperson Jessica Powell. Plus, some
bonus stats on how much traffic newspapers get from search engines….

Matt
Cutts On Site Problems & Mistakes To Avoid
Ever wonder what is going through the head of a Matt Cutts (Googler) while he
is sitting on a site reviews panel reviewing sites? Matt Cutts posted his
detailed notes of the panel he did in Vegas at PubCon. He explains some on
site problems and mistakes a webmaster should avoid. It is worth a read,
because Matt totally kicked my coverage of that session….

The
Complete Google Master Plan
Google Operating Systems located and posted the Full Google Master Plan 1.0.
Remember about a month and a half ago, the Google Master Plan was erased?
Well, according to Google OS, said it was erased because it was getting a bit
"crufty." The image was taken by Chris diBona, here it is:…

Search
Forums Roundup: Nov. 27, 2006
Today’s SearchDay, Search Engine Forums Spotlight, features our weekly links
to this week’s hot topics from search engine forums across the web: Hack Your
Competition Out of Organic Search – MSN And Yahoo Join Google With Sitemaps –
How Local Search And SEM Relates – What to Look for When Purchasing Links? –
What Tools Does An SEO Guru Use? and more….

Google
Settles With Some Belgian Publishers Over Belgium News Inclusion
Via Techmeme, news that Google has settled with two Belgian publishing groups
involved in a lawsuit against it over content included in Google News Belgium.
This comes a day after Google’s legal case was reheard in an appeal. The
settlement, following what seems a similar settlement with AP earlier this
year, seems to open the door that Google is going to continue making such
appeasements rather than fight cases in court….

Google
Sending Out AdSense Holiday Gifts
It is that time of the year again. We have our first report of a Google
Adsense holiday gift from WebmasterWorld. The gift appears to be a 3.6 inch
TFT digital photo frame. No pictures of the frame yet, but I hope someone
emails one to me….

Google
Video France Sued For Copyright Infringement
Reuters reports Google France was sued by Flach Film, a French film producer,
for copyright infringement. They claim their video, "The World According to
Bush," was published on Google Video France, and viewed more 50,000 times,
before Google removed the video. The French film producer estimates $648,700
in prejudice but Google said "our terms and conditions specify that users
(Internet surfers) don’t have permission to use videos which they don’t own
the rights to." Google has put away $200M for copyright case legal issues with
the YouTube acquisition….

Google
To Go To Belgium Court Finally
The AP reports that Google is finally going to show up in court to present
their side of the case in the Belgium copyright suit. Google has never showed
up to fight the publishers and papers in Belgium the first time the case was
heard….

Google
Blog Results Search Creep
Andy Boyd found Google testing blog search results at the bottom of the Google
search results. He posted a screen capture here, as you can see, it is fairly
similar to how they have integrated news archive results into Google
search….

Yahoo
Image Search Bug Showed Sex Images For Innocent Search
Yesterday, on Thanksgiving, The Register reported that a search at Yahoo
Images for franchise returned very offensive and disturbing images. I will not
describe the images, but I saw them myself and as soon as I saw it, I emailed
my contacts at Yahoo. Soon after the images were pulled from the search
results. It seems to me that someone figured out a way to easily insert
pornographic images into Yahoo images for a search term even with safe search
on. The Register has blurred and censored screen captures of the first line of
results….

Extended
Indented Google Results Bug?
Philipp Lenssen spotted listings with more than one indented results for a
search on get fuzzy. The first two results were from comics.com and the two
other indented results were from Yahoo News. All these results were under the
first listing, so we had three indented results showing under the top listing.
Typically, there is only one indented result and no more. I cannot replicate
this, it seems like a weird bug that may have been fixed. Philipp has a screen
capture of it in action….

Google
Book Search Catches Victorian Plagiarists
We tend to assume that plagiarism is a reasonably modern day phenomena but a
fascinating article from Paul Collins "Dead Plagiarists Society" illustrates
that is not always the case. In fact it would appear that Victorian authors
stole work from earlier authors who in turn had stolen it from even earlier
ones, and the article gives some nice examples of this. More importantly, it
provides a fascinating use for Google Book Search, which I’d certainly not
considered before, and it’s actually a rather interesting experiment – take a
partial sentence, plug it into book search and add words onto the…

SEM
Certification & Training Courses
The move toward offering certification and training in search marketing is
accelerating. Here’s a rundown on some new courses and developments I’ve heard
of recently….

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.